My ups-and-downs with Allen consisted of the occasional elevator ride at 1700 Broadway in Manhattan, where the offices of ABKCO, his company, occupied the 41st floor and my Record World Magazine colleagues and I toiled on 42. My sense of awe (mixed with a bit of fear) and Allen's intense "Do not disturb" vibe limited our encounters to some variation of, "How's it goin'?" -- "Great!"

From time to time, our staffers reported elevated thrills with Klein clients like George Harrison (whom Klein helped mount the monumental Concert for Bangladesh), John Lennon (whose 1974 track "Steel and Glass" refers to 1700), and Phil Spector, who thanked our receptionist for pressing the 41 button without his having to ask. A peak non-Kleinian moment came when an aide to James Brown was spotted giving a haircut to the hardest-working man in show business en route to his throne on 39. More than once, we looked up (literally) to our neighbor on 42, ABA commissioner/former New York Knicks star Dave Debusschere, who joined us in being able to say that one band's ceiling was another fan's floor.

At a time when our publication was barely profitable, Klein was one of our most generous and lavish advertisers. ABKCO ran beautiful four-color pages or spreads with greater regularity than most major labels. Those ads didn't sell records -- we were a trade rag -- but they signaled extra-mile support for his artists and let potential clients know that Klein would go to the wall for them if they would only let him. I think he was also reminding his adversaries that he played to win, and that if they tried to fuck with him he'd sue their asses forever or until they went away empty-handed, whichever came first.

Despite his potential leverage with Record World, Klein never asked for favors or complained about chart positions or editorial coverage. The only thing he insisted on -- and this was sacred -- was primo ad placement.

Goodman, author of several other books including the essential The Mansion on the Hill, did his own industry wood-shedding during the '80s at Cash Box, a rival trade weekly HQed a few blocks north at 1775 Broadway. He explains in expert detail how Klein -- beginning with Sam Cooke in the early '60s, continuing with The Rolling Stones and other major acts and then the ultimate prize, The Beatles -- deployed financial wizardry, a gift for negotiating, and fierce intimidation to strike visionary long-term deals for his clients.

Though Goodman clearly admires Klein, he doesn't soft-pedal the man's dark side, which was far more apparent in his empire-building years than later on. Klein, whose mother died when he was nine months old, spent part of his youth in an orphanage and was capable of brutality toward his enemies and belittling harshness to those he loved.

Occasionally, Klein's negotiating savvy gave way to arrogance. One time, he blew off an IRS agent, an act of truculence that may have contributed to his loss to Paul McCartney in a British court battle. Years later, in a separate case, Klein was convicted of tax fraud and served a two month prison term for failing to report income from sales of promotional records.

The relationship between Klein and John Lennon -- two geniuses with big egos and deep insecurities -- was characterized by ups and downs that were more like roller coaster spills than elevator rides. In "Steel and Glass," Lennon addresses Klein directly when he sings, "Your mother left you when you were small/But you're gonna wish you wasn't born at all," (The song evokes John's anti-Paul screed, "How Do You Sleep?" for which Klein supplied the perfect line, "The only thing you done was yesterday.")

For Lennon and Klein, though, respect and, yes, love outstripped conflict. (May Pang -- who held various jobs for Apple Records and was John's significant other for some years during the '70s -- says that Klein didn't mind the high-profile vituperation and that there was genuine friendship between the two men.) After Lennon was murdered in December of 1980, Goodman writes, Lennon's wife Yoko Ono told Klein that she wished it were Klein who died. But in the end Yoko and Klein were friends too, and when Klein died she attended his funeral with son Sean.

Goodman concludes, "In a lifetime of searching for love and validation, the closest Allen Klein had ever come to a soulmate was John Lennon."

------------------------------

Klein made a fortune for himself as well as for his clients, of course. But you can't read Goodman's book without seeing that his subject cared deeply about those he repped -- and about their music. In 1984, RCA Records A&R VP Gregg Geller, acting on a tip from former colleague and friend Joe McEwen, discovered an astonishing live Sam Cooke album languishing in the vaults.

Geller had concerns about whether Klein, who owned the rights to Cooke's catalogue, would cooperate in releasing the material. In the event, Geller recalled, "Allen's attention to detail was phenomenal...I saw that there is a reason artists gravitate toward him: he loves to do battle. And if he's doing battle for you, you're in great hands." Cooke's album, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, sparked a Sam Cooke revival and is widely acknowledged as one of the best live records of all time.

Gregg, a Record World alum, tells me, "Whatever trepidations I had were based almost entirely on the RCA business affairs department's fear of AK, based on 20-plus years worth of contentious back and forth with him (in which he always got the best of them -- and rightfully so. They were always in the wrong.)"

Respected industry vet/erstwhile Record Worlder Bob Merlis chimes in with this Allen anecdote: "ABKCO was one of my very first PR clients after Warner Bros showed me the door. AK thought I was the right guy to work on a new Sam Cooke package entitled 'Keep Movin' On.' I was thrilled to have something to do with the legacy of Sam and have professional juxtaposition to Allen who had always been friendly with me at the annual party he threw at the Waldorf Towers folding each year's RRHOF inductions. He kept me on and had me work on various projects including a massive Rolling Stones reissue program, etc.

"After a year or two I got a call from ABKCO's GM, Iris Keitel, who said that Allen was in the office with her and he wanted me to know something. In lieu of putting him on the phone she related what he told her to tell me as he was saying it -- I could hear his voice faintly in the background. 'Allen says that because of the shitty job you've done and because you never call him...' At this point I held my breath but I knew it was some kind of ploy because Iris said these things with a mirthful tone. 'He wants to give you a raise...retroactively!' I responded to Iris, 'Please tell Mr. Klein that I shall endeavor to keep doing a shitty job and will do my best not to try to call him.' It was Allen's way of being both generous and foreboding but I really didn't fall for it. I knew that deep inside he was very kind and I'll never forget what he did for me. He was the only client I've ever had who gave me an unsolicited raise...for doing a 'shitty job.'"

Klein died in 2009 of complications from Alzheimer's, but his financial farsightedness and patience -- paradoxical in a man whose thoughts sped so fast they made an ADD sufferer seem like a Zen Master -- laid the groundwork for ABKCO Music & Records, with Allen's son Jody at the helm, to thrive for decades to come. (Klein's daughter Robin runs the film division.)

Today, the company owns the rights to compositions and recordings by Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones, Bobby Womack, Eric Burdon, The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, and The Kinks as well as the treasure trove of material in the Cameo Parkway catalogue by such artists as Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, ? & the Mysterians, and Dee Dee Sharp.

Last summer, ABKCO released The Complete SAR Records Recordings, which L.C. Cooke -- Sam's younger brother -- recorded before his brother's death in 1964. (A Sam Cooke biopic is in pre-production.) Recently, the company put out SAR compilations on The Valentinos (Bobby Womack and his brothers) and The Soul Stirrers. And on July 10, ABKCO will release a limited-edition 12-inch of The Rolling Stones' immortal single, "Satisfaction," to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original record reaching No. 1.

Allen Klein hits the streets just days before the debut of Apple's new "music ecosystem," which, Taylor Swift notwithstanding, feels to struggling musicians and songwriters like another nail in their coffers.

By force of will and with a singular imagination, Allen Klein made spectacular deals for his artists. Has the digital revolution made it impossible for music creators to reap fair compensation for their work? Or is there a budding deal-maker out there -- someone who cares about music more than tech -- with the talent and drive to take on Apple, Spotify, and Google the way Klein took on RCA, EMI, and CBS? If so, that revolutionary-in-the-making could start with the question, "WWAD?" -- What would Allen do?

(Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, made The Rolling Stones, and Transformed Rock and Roll is published by Eamon Dolan Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle, Audible, and Audio CD versions are available.)]]>Elliot Horne's Hiptionary: Dig We Must!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.74437562015-05-26T12:58:57-04:002015-05-26T14:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/In the melancholic aftermath of the recent deaths of record industry giants Stan Cornyn (The Coast/Warner Bros.) and Bruce Lundvall (The Apple/CBS, Blue Note), I was drawn to The Hiptionary, a boss tome penned in 1963 by RCA Records publicist Elliot Horne. The wondrous sights and sounds of pre-Beatles America came flooding back...

Elliot Horne, whose clock sadly stopped in 1989 when he was 67, was an 18-carat cat. He didn't have boatloads of biz juice and wasn't a major breadmaker. But he was a sweet scratcher with Cornynesque language chops and a Lundvallian devotion to jazz. When it came to schooling bizzers and civilians alike on the skinny of what's what, hip-wise, Elliot was The Man.

You know that gag about someone's picture being next to a certain word in the dictionary? Flip over The Hiptionary and cast your eyeball at the author. ("Dig we must" barrier courtesy of Consolidated Edison, an outfit with serious juice.)

My ultra-hip mom brought The Hiptionary to our Long Island crib when I was a mere junior high book-buster yet to dust my first feathers. Horne's riffs -- shoes were "ends," astronauts were "cloud poppers," the CIA was "room service" -- cooled all my hang ups. And the killer illos (by Mad Magazine's Jack Davis) of such high groovers and twisted studs Mr. Bad Face (Mao), Der Fig (Adenauer), The Hot Frog (DeGaulle), and The Ghost Kicker (Krushchev) were the ultimate kick.

Elliot was a subterranean wig whose brains had brains. He earned his geets as a gigging class everycat, a peeper-sporting, fancy threads-wearing, spank-planking hip hyper for RCA Records, a diskery strictly from corporate cubesville (squaresville squared). That he flacked for some turkeys might have cacked the whole tune, but mostly he worked the jazz/soul side of the street, where heavy swingers like Sonny Rollins and Sam Cooke kept their pads. His tag line for Cooke's greatest hits album -- "He lives in the top ten"-- might have inspired a "You Send Me" from Don Draper.

The Hiptionary shaped up as a crazy score until President Kennedy was assassinated shortly after it hit the streets. Not that the scene was a total bagel, medicine tune or ape bag. But what was a gas before November 22, 1963 was suddenly a deep drag.

When sales became lame as Mame, did Elliot play the blame game? Hells, no! He may not have been choppin' high, but the mean reds never took over. He didn't jump salty or bork his bowel. Nor was he bugged, beat, and wasted. His attic was cool and didn't need cleaning from a head man or a konk class.

Early in '64, Elliot landed a living-room gig on the boss TV gamer To Tell the Truth, wherein he told it like it was while two impostors served up nothing but applesauce and horsefeathers. All four hep cats on the panel -- Kitty Carlisle, Peggy Cass, Tom Poston, and Orson Bean -- correctly identified our hero.

Biz mavens and journos agreed that Elliot was beyond supermurgatroid. A&R vet/vault guy extraordinaire Gregg Geller told me, "When I started my Sam Cooke campaign at RCA, it was as if Elliot was starving to work on something he could relate to. Never before or since have any of my catalog projects received so much attention from any aspect of a record company's marketing arm."

Susan Ochshorn, one of Elliot's two crumbcrushers, told me that her dad's memorial at St. Peter's -- Manhattan's jazz church -- was somethin' else. Jazz critic Gary Giddins paid tribute in the Village Voice, writing that Elliot was "the best record company PR man I ever knew."

I know what Giddins meant. During my 10 years as editor of the trade rag Record World (1972-'82), the hippest hip hyper never hyped me. When he was gassed, he worked gravy and took care of business like the whole bit was at stake.

When, on occasion, he needed a favor, Mr. Horne got on the horn and said, "Mike, I need a favor." If I could do it, I would. If not, everything was still jake.

Elliot and his wife Joan Ochshorn at the Newport Jazz Festival, circa 1967. Photo courtesy of Susan Ochshorn.]]>Jeb: All Dough, No Doughnuts, No Funtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.71892362015-05-01T11:21:35-04:002015-05-01T18:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/
While bingeing on donor dough, Jeb has been purging doughnuts and other comfort foods from his daily fare, as per the strictures of the Paleo diet. That's allowed the GOP's most prodigious bringer home of bacon -- estimates are that he's raised tens of millions before the race has officially begun -- to shed some 30 pounds faster than you can say "pancake breakfast."

Jeb, always the pudgy Bush, was wise to trim down a bit. But the man who describes himself as "always hungry" looks more gaunt than lean. According to press reports, the regimen that makes a bite of blueberry pie a "cheat" makes him grumpy.

You'd be a grump too if you faced months of slogging through feeding frenzies in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina against as many as two dozen rivals -- after your campaign roll-out failed to stir the "shock and awe" your advisors predicted would clear the field. (Jeb ought to fire whoever resurrected the shockingly awful phrase so evocative of his brother's catastrophic presidency.)

We don't love our presidents for the foods they eat, but we do remember them for the foods they loved. Who can forget Lyndon Johnson's fondness for Fresca and tapioca pudding, Richard Nixon's penchant for bombarding his cottage cheese with ketchup, or Ronald Reagan's jar of jelly beans?

The two Bush presidencies, however, are perhaps better known for foods eschewed. George H. W. Bush, Jeb's dad, proudly proclaimed his hatred of broccoli; more to the point, he famously tossed his cookies at the home of the Japanese prime minister in 1992. And while W liked to curl up with a pretzel, he gave the White House staff a scare when he choked on one and fainted while watching football.

The New York Times says Jeb's denial of the pleasures of the palate "runs the risk of putting him at a dietary distance from an American electorate that still binges on carbohydrates and, after eight years of a tea-sipping president, craves a relatable eater-in-chief."

That's silly. President Obama is naturally lean and athletic, but he seems to be a reasonably normal eater who enjoys the occasional Five Guys cheeseburger, perhaps even followed by a clandestine cigarette.

Jeb's obsession with coffer-filling at the expense of effective flesh-peddling led The Hill's A.B. Stoddard this week to describe his candidacy as all money and no mojo. If he really wants to be president -- if his obsessions with fund-raising and weight-losing don't mask a deep ambivalence about running the grueling race for the White House -- maybe he should put his guilt on the back burner and scarf down a few slices of pizza. He'll look and feel better. Plus, research shows that most obsessive dieters gain back all the weight they lost and then some.

Finally, can't Jeb see that an overweening interest in diet is irretrievably blue state? Think Michelle Obama's vegetable gardens or Michael Bloomberg's ill-fated attempts to ban gas-tank-sized soda in New York City (the state's highest court banned the ban). Imagine what a few pounds could do to persuade Chris Christie's followers -- or Mike Huckabee's -- to throw their weight behind a moderately ampler Bush candidacy.]]>Cassandra Wilson Says 'Happy 100th, Lady Day'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.70179382015-04-07T13:41:06-04:002015-06-07T05:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/Coming Forth By Day, a strange, atmospheric brew produced by Nick Launay (whose credits include music by Nick Cave and Arcade Fire) with shimmering string arrangements by the incomparable Van Dyke Parks. The record manages to evoke Holiday's sad, beautiful spirit -- she died in 1959 -- without sounding remotely like her.

Coming Forth features a profound take on "Crazy He Calls Me," a song first recorded by Holiday in October 1949, shortly after my father, Carl Sigman, and his collaborator, Bob Russell, finished writing it. I was born just a couple of months before its release as a single, so I've always considered it the "Crazy" sister I never had. Wilson's interpretation, which clocks in at a leisurely 6.18, is a fine new outfit for my sister to wear to a centennial celebration.

"Crazy" had a longer gestation period than most offspring. Carl and Bob penned most of it before WWII. But they couldn't come up with the right lyric for the bridge -- the B in the standard AABA construction of so many pop songs. When the U.S. joined the war effort, the writers tabled their struggle in favor of a more important one.

After the war, Carl met and married Eleanor "Terry" Berkowitz, Louis Prima's young Gal Friday. Neither had ever been farther west than New Jersey, so they hopped a train to L.A. for an extended honeymoon.

During that sojourn, they spent many hours at Bob and his wife Hannah Russell's Burbank home, where they ate, drank and played Charades. But Bob was obsessed with finishing "Crazy," and when the socializing ended, the lyrical agonistes began.

Still bridge-less and at their wit's end after one grueling all-nighter, inspiration struck Carl in the form of a ghostly sign that suddenly hovered above him. This was no celestial command; Carl had nothing but disdain for the supernatural. It was a sign he'd seen for years on the wall of the Army mess hall. "The difficult I'll do right now/The impossible will take a little while" was supposed to inspire spud-peeling GIs; it happened also to go hand in glove with the melodic bridge of "Crazy."

Billie Holiday's version of "Crazy He Calls Me" is definitive. As the song matured to what some used to call "retirement age," it's been covered by hundreds if not thousands of artists including Linda Ronstadt, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole and -- as "Crazy She Calls Me" -- Rod Stewart, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. Audra MacDonald won a record sixth Tony Award when she sang "Crazy" and other Holiday songs inLady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, an uncanny channeling of Billie at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater last year.

Billie's recording of "Crazy" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010. Industry vet Bob Merlis, who submitted the nomination, says, "I've been taken by this song for a long time, and Billie Holliday's reading of it is the very definition of 'singular'.... Nobody else comes close. What has long intrigued me is the grammatical construction of the title. It seems like a transliteration of something said in Yiddish. I mean, it's unusual to put it in the order it's in; it would be more standard to have said or written 'He calls me crazy' but the poetry of it lies in the very fact it's backwards. If not Yiddish, maybe Shakespearean and, most certainly, wonderfully poetic."

The crazy order of words in the title comes full circle in the lyric's final phrase. After the singer acknowledges her sublime craziness -- "Sure I'm Crazy" -- she closes with, "Crazy in love am I."

I was barely three months old when "Crazy" came into the world. Call her crazy, but my mom says that the instant I heard the opening notes of Billie's recording, I did the impossible: leaping over the walls of my crib, I landed squarely on the piano bench and welcomed my new sister into the world by tickling the ivories like the Duke and singing along in perfect three-part harmony.

(Portions of this blog appeared in a posting last June.)]]>Bob Durst, Camp Counselortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.69398022015-03-25T16:03:01-04:002015-05-25T05:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/The Jinx to its riveting conclusion -- when Robert Durst, the subject of the six-part HBO documentary, all but outed himself as a serial murderer. It was a conclusion powerful enough to prompt the FBI to arrest Durst on suspicion that he murdered a female friend in Los Angeles in 2000.

But like just a few others, The Jinx had me remembering my own run-in with Durst, when I was just a kid at summer camp deep in the heart of the Berkshires.

Post-Jinx, I discovered evidence of that period in an old filing cabinet. Amongst old piano recital programs, yellowed copies of LA Weekly, and a Gold Record of Paul Anka and Odia Coates' disgraceful single "(You're) Having My Baby," I found a 1964 photo of me and my bunkmates. Standing behind us was our counselor, Bob Durst.

I don't claim any insight into the psyche of this individual. I mostly recall fairly innocuous interactions with a guy who may have gone on to do terrible things.

But I'm not saying Bob was normal. In fact, my bunkmates and I discovered early on that he was a certain kind of drug dealer; and, sure, if prompted, perhaps we might conclude that even then he was a serial criminal.

The drug -- a luscious, thick milkshake with the ironic street name "Awful Awful" -- could have been opioid-receptor Nirvana. It was manufactured in the backroom lab of an ice cream shoppe deviously dubbed "Friendly's." (Years later, perhaps in an effort to dodge the authorities, the Awful Awful was renamed the "Fribble.")

Bob's "crimes" back then: illicit transport of an intoxicating substance across camp lines; intent to distribute said substance; scaring the shit out of minors by shaking them awake in the dead of night to inject said substance directly into their bodies; and possession of drug paraphernalia including the "wide straw," an unusually potent delivery system.

In layman's terms, Durst shocked the hell out of us by treating us to the best stuff we'd ever tasted. The pleasure of that first dreamlike gulp -- bound up as it was with the momentary terror of being stirred from a deep sleep by a hulking presence -- was nothing short of orgasmic: a sweet jolt of cold that went down smooth and set a standard for all future moments of ecstasy.

To confirm that my recollections were as sublime as I imagined, I reached out to two bunkmates who went on to become gifted writers. When they articulated their remembrances of Awful Awfuls past, I was not disappointed.

Marc Barasch, author of such best-selling and profound books as The Healing Path and Field Notes on the Compassionate Life, recalls "being shaken awake by Bob, the wild-and-crazy-guy counselor, grinning over me as he handed me a frosty Awful Awful, straw already in place. It seemed transgressive and conspiratorial in a camp that required us to tuck our army-drab blankets into our bunks with perfect hospital corners."

For Stanley Weiser, whose many wonderful screenplays include Wall Street and W, the experience was literally Proustian: "Awful Awfuls are to me what Proust's madeleines were to him. An instant conjuring of a moment in time where all in the world was safe and still and magical."

I never feared violence from Durst. Nor, as far as I can tell, did my bunkmates. But he was scary in a more existential way. The smart/mega-rich/good-looking/well-built guy from Scarsdale -- who could smack a softball harder than anyone else in camp -- had an air of superiority that made me think I must be doing something wrong even when I knew I wasn't.

Now, in the aftermath of The Jinx, I stare at my old camp photo with fear and fascination. Perhaps I'm projecting, but his eyes seem to say, "I couldn't give a shit." And the odd tilt of his head, as though it was already overruling the rest of his body to descend hellward, is deeply chilling.

Do I see the kind of arrogance that might cause a person to believe he can do unspeakable things with impunity? I believe I do.

And I feel a retroactive nearness to evil...

]]>My Mind Misremembered, Not Metag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.66363582015-02-07T12:20:48-05:002015-04-09T05:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/
We were having a great time insulting one another when we heard a loud pop. At first, I thought it was a thunderclap, but I looked up and the sky was clear. Next thing we we knew, we were thrown far off the road and found ourselves mired in the sandy mass some call Jones Beach. When I noticed that the sign that said "West End 2" was upside down, I knew something was wrong, very wrong.

Turned out we were walloped by an RPG. For those of you who may not know, that's a rocket-propelled grenade. There was nothing but sand and water as far as the eye could see. Our iPods, iPhones, iPads, iWatches, Kindle Fires and Nooks had been burned to a crisp.

Robbed of our ability to have fun or communicate with the outside world, we spent two long days and nights on that lonely stretch of sand, eating whatever hot dogs, burgers, and fries we could scare up at the concession stand and washing them down with brewskies and Cokes that tasted as though they'd been canned or bottled weeks before.

I must have told this story five hundred times since then -- to friends, therapists, and lawyers; in blogs, on Facebook and Twitter. Over the years, I've added details that emerged during a series of excruciating therapy sessions. Like the time I had to go to the bathroom really bad and the stalls were so far away, I peed in the water. Or the time I was riding a three-foot high wave, landed flat on my face, and had to take several deep breaths before normal breathing was restored.

Here's the kicker: By the time I got home on Sunday -- we were rescued by a surfer dude we ran into at the hot dog stand -- I'd missed the "Ebb Tide" episode of The Wire. That's the one where McNulty finds a body floating in the water. Which reminds me of another story...Anyhow, this was before On Demand, so you can imagine how painful that was.

-----------------

Now, all of a sudden, just because I told my story on a TV show, a few of my "buddies" are saying that our jitney wasn't shot down at all, that I'm making the whole thing up. I got my old roomie to back me up, but then he said he was making the backing up up.

They're saying that the popping sound was the sound of a flat tire. They're saying that the Jitney driver called Triple-A from his iPhone and that we were back on the road in less than an hour. No Jones Beach, no old Cokes, no surfing the waves.

Now that I think about it, I have to admit that my brothers are correct. I'm not sure how my mind put the flat tire story -- what really happened -- together with the RPG/Jones Beach story. I know I didn't do it -- my mind did. I would never do a thing like that.]]>Elvis! 80!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.64371362015-01-08T14:40:04-05:002015-03-10T05:59:01-04:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/ this close to Elvis Presley, who was born 80 years ago today.

It was June 1972, a heady time to be in the music business, a time when there were still lots of small, independent labels run by colorful -- if sometimes crooked -- characters who cared about making great records.

As a reporter for the trade magazine Record World, I got to cover Elvis's press conference at Madison Square Garden on June 9, just before his first-ever New York performances.

Having staged a dramatic comeback a few years earlier, The King strode into the pressroom still looking like royalty -- tall, tan, impossibly handsome and projecting an otherworldly charisma.

Elvis was self-deprecating, quick-witted and gentle. He fielded questions about his hair (he'd stopped using "greasy kid's stuff") and his opinion of Vietnam War protesters (he declined to comment). When asked whether he was indeed the shy, humble person his image suggested, he stood up and unbuttoned his jacket to reveal a colossal Vegas-style gold belt buckle. 'Nuff said.

The presser was filmed for TV, of course, and the clip below (at 1:38) confirms how happy I was to have a front row seat for that piece of pop music history. Two seats to my left, and just as happy as I, was Record World's then-editor Gregg Geller, who would go on to a stellar A&R career that included the signing of Elvis Costello, the greatest Elvis this side of, well, Elvis..

"I was so awestruck to be in the presence of The King that I was incapable of asking a question, one of my greatest regrets -- ever!" Gregg recalls. He also remembers the role of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis' larger than life manager, in the proceedings. "He was selling pencils -- the better to take notes with. It was a press conference, after all."

That night's show wasn't Elvis at his best, but it hardly mattered. He gave the overflow crowd an enthralling communal experience. He took us from cries of exultation to tears of grief and back again, with a dollop of humor lest we start singing in tongues -- from the over-the-top "Also Sprach Zarathustra" introduction to the stirring finale of "The Impossible Dream," by way of "All Shook Up" and "Heartbreak Hotel."

Five years later, when news broke that Elvis had died, a deep gloom settled in at the Record World offices. Writer and Elvis fanatic David McGee was the most heartbroken, and the most eloquent. He wrote, "In Elvis, I found someone to believe in; in rock and roll, as I learned it from him, I found a way of life that I wouldn't swap for any amount of money, because it was, and is, endlessly rewarding and fulfilling. It's only natural that I feel a certain hollowness inside of me now. A certain hollowness? I feel as if my guts had been ripped out."

Elvis recorded several of my father's songs, including "My Heart Cries for You," which was written with Percy Faith on a bet in 10 minutes at the trotters. It was a No. 1 hit for Guy Mitchell in 1950 and a throwaway for Elvis, something he sang for fun and memorialized on the Home Recordings album.

Also on that album was "What Now My Love," Dad's 1962 collaboration with Gilbert Becaud, which became a staple of Elvis' live show and also appeared on the multi-million-selling Elvis Aloha from Hawaii album/DVD. One time a golf partner asked Dad to name some of his tunes; when Dad mentioned "What Now My Love," the guy replied, "You didn't write that -- Elvis did."

(Portions of this blog appeared in a blog several years ago.)]]>'Enjoy Yourself' at 65tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.64011302014-12-31T12:42:37-05:002015-03-02T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/
The first time I heard "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)" I hadn't been born yet. Neither had the song. We were gestating -- me in my mom's womb, the song in a telephone wire.

In 1948, from my folks' apartment on Manhattan's East Side, my dad, Carl Sigman, wrote "Enjoy Yourself" over the phone with L.A.-based songwriter Herb Magidson. In other words, he wrote it transcontinentally with the writer of "The Continental."

"Enjoy Yourself" and I were both released in '49 and so we're practically twins. Not identical twins, though. Unlike you and me, the song is immortal. It will never not exist. If no one sings it for a thousand years, it will still be there, waiting with perfect serenity for some future being to caterwaul it in the shower.

Immortality is nice, but there's more to eternal life than mere survival. In the Darwinian quest for standard-hood, evolution is a must!

If my life began with a big bang, "Enjoy Yourself" began with the Big Bands, most notably recordings by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra and Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (vocals by Kenny Gardner). Lombardo's iteration was a Top 10 smash and he made the number a New Year's Eve staple by performing it year after year at NYC's Roosevelt Hotel. Covers by Bing Crosby, Doris Day, and Eddie Cantor peppered our early childhood.

By the time Louis Prima put his zany imprimatur on "Enjoy Yourself" later in the '50s, we -- the song and I, that is -- were old enough to know how cool it was that my parents first met in Louis's office in the Brill Building, and that in a way we owed our very existence to the inimitable Mr. P.

In 1967, I went off to college and became an alienated hippy radical who enjoyed not enjoying myself. I wasn't interested in hearing about one comfortable white guy telling another comfortable white guy to eat, drink and be merry before he kicks the bucket. How exactly does a napalmed Vietnamese mother or a starving Appalachian orphan decide to enjoy themselves?

I conveniently forgot that earlier in the '60s, ska master Prince Buster had reimagined "Enjoy Yourself," syncopating the beat and singing, "Get wisdom, knowledge and understanding."

After college, I immersed myself in all kinds of pop music and my attitude towards "Enjoy Yourself" shifted once again. I loved hearing Der Bingle croon a bit of it with Dino on TV and heard the Doris Day recording with new ears. My mom reminded me that "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)" was a Chinese proverb and I wondered if the song was less about hedonism than about living in the present moment. If we don't, it'll be way later than we think.

Add to that the countless times we've heard it in our heads or sung it to ourselves or to others. (One YouTube commenter writes, "My Gran sang this song every time I saw her for nearly 40 years and we'll be playing it at her funeral next week"; the one and only time I met Michael Buble, he didn't say "Hi," he sang a few bars of "Enjoy Yourself.")

Before we turned 65 last year, "Enjoy Yourself" and I got together to discuss that milestone. Which is to say, "Enjoy Yourself" spoke and I listened.

The song said, "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think/Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink/The years go by, as quickly as a wink/Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself it's later than you think."

I'd like to think that as long as there's a New Year's Eve, there will be a place for "Enjoy Yourself."

(Portions of this blog appeared last December.)

]]>On Memory, Medication, and Meditationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.63872522014-12-28T17:11:13-05:002015-02-27T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/
I got defensive. She had to be wrong.

I was always the guy who remembered everything, from baseball stats to the B-sides of obscure singles to phone numbers I hadn't dialed in decades. But recently, finding my eyeglasses and keys had required more and more sleuthing, my sense of direction had gone from mediocre to pathetic, and I could tell you frighteningly little about the book I'd just finished.

And yet... so what if my keys had a mind of their own? I still knew what to do with them when I found them. If I got lost on my way to the Farmer's Market, my car had GPS. And who cared whodunit in the new Michael Connelly novel? I still remembered every note of every Beatles song ever recorded.

I freaked because I was worried she was right.

It was too late to call my doctor, so I turned to Dr. Google.

The good Doc was unimpressed that my dad's mind was razor-sharp when he died at 91 or that my mom, well into her 80s, remains remarkably tuned in. Good genes, it turns out, don't count for much in the Alzheimer's crapshoot. That Dr. G gave me barely passing grades on a couple of online memory quizzes wasn't even cold comfort.

I felt a buzz of confidence when my mind conjured the opening theme of a piano piece I'd been memorizing and I imagined my hands leaping octaves and landing on the right notes. I froze when I couldn't think of the composer's name.

My frustration spiked as I ran through the alphabet and the composer's name, a name I'd seen hundreds of times, still wouldn't come. Then I flashed on what a friend once told me was her first thought at the most painful moment of her life: "Thank God I meditate."

I said, "Google schmoogle," turned off the computer, dimmed and the lights and settled in for a dose of mindfulness. My intention was to sit quietly and simply notice, without judgment, where my mind wandered. But my mind didn't wander at all; it ping-ponged between two contradictory thoughts: "I'm sure I don't have Alzheimer's. What if I have Alzheimer's?"

Eventually, something shifted, and I watched the dark clouds of rumination make room for four bright, beautiful words: "What about the Wellbutrin?"

I'd been taking a fairly high dose (450mg per day) of Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, as a treatment not for depression but for anxiety. It had been effective precisely because it mitigated the kind of obsessive thinking I was doing right up to that moment. It worked because it made me forget. Could this drug, without which I might not have been able to identify the drug as a suspect, be the culprit?

I'd iron out those ironies later. Another quick consultation with Dr. Google brought hope: memory loss can indeed be a side effect of Wellbutrin.

The next morning, my doctor eagerly confirmed that Wellbutrin was likely contributing to my forgetfulness. We agreed that I'd experiment for ten days with a one-third reduction in dosage, from 450mg to 300.

My memory improved within days and, astonishingly, without a discernible increase in anxiety. I wondered if this might be a placebo effect (if so, I thought, I'll take two) or the temporary, illusory relief psychoanalysts call "flight into health." But it felt real.

I cut back to 150 mg of Wellbutrin a few weeks later and recently eliminated the drug altogether. So far, so good. I still can't name that damn composer, and that makes me nervous. (I caved and looked at the score: it's the fabulous Louis Moreau Gottschalk.) But I've been flooded with detailed memories of stuff that happened 40 years ago, and that feels like a miracle.

Of course, putting this in writing has activated my JRS (Jinx Ruination Syndrome), a condition common among Jews of a certain age who grew up on Long Island and believe that the act of admitting you feel good about anything automatically ruins everything. But JRS is incurable, and I can live with that.

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A friend who has kids and works with people in their twenties tells me that boomers aren't the only ones who aren't sure why they came into a room or forget where they left their keys. Those events may be warning signals -- or side effects of medication -- but more likely they're indications that if to err is human, to forget is too.

All this has me wondering whether the catastrophic, late-in-life slide into Alzheimer's that afflicts some has the rest of us panicked by what's simply an ordinary part of living.

We all need to be mindful of signs of mental decline in ourselves and those we care about. And anyone concerned that their forgetfulness may be due to Wellbutrin or any other drug should consult their doctor -- and weigh the benefits against the side effects -- before making any changes.

But if you're on meds and think you may be losing your mind, you just might be better off losing your meds.]]>PR Guru Schools Hollywood Moguls on Email Fallouttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.63280642014-12-15T12:21:48-05:002015-02-14T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/email exchanges between Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal and movie producer Scott Rudin that insulted Hollywood royalty. Angelina Jolie? She's a "minimally talented spoiled brat." Leonardo DiCaprio's behavior? "Despicable." Pascal and Rudin joked that President Obama probably favored such movies as "Django Unchained," "12 Years a Slave," and anything featuring Kevin Hart, a black actor-comedian referred to -- in a different email -- by another Sony exec as a "whore."

After the discovery, Pascal and Rudin got busy apologizing to anyone who would take their calls. Meanwhile, a group of top Tinseltown producers and studio execs retained the world's top crisis management guru -- a man known only by his acronym, "TWTCMG" -- to create a plan for handling revelations sure to come from their own nasty emails.

Here is TWTCMG's plan, in the form of an email which was hacked and immediately published by Sticky-Shrieks, a short-lived guerilla website whose URL has mysteriously disappeared.

Dear Mogul,

Let's get real. No matter what I say, you will continue to make racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise offensive comments in your emails; and sooner or later, those comments will see the light of day.

I say this because you are narcissistic and quite possibly sociopathic (I'm not judging!). And because you are ruthlessly competitive, you're surrounded by sycophants, and you have "fuck you" money. Nastiness is in your nature (cf. the fable The Scorpion and the Frog, as told ad nauseam in so many of your movies).

My plan obviates the need for piecemeal apologies like the ones we're seeing from Amy; what could be worse than admitting you called Al Sharpton to "begin a healing process"? Remember: Every minute spent apologizing is a minute that could be spent insulting the person you just slept with and/or making more money.

Simply insert the following disclaimer at the end of every email you send. This will permit you to rant freely -- to "be here now" with your venom -- without the specter of ex post facto groveling hanging over your keyboard.

"If you feel that you may have been offended by anything in this email, whether or not it was sent directly to you, I hereby apologize to you -- for all time, at any time and from time to time on this planet and throughout the known universe -- for any offense you may feel you have felt.

"Further, I hereby pledge that whatever you may have read that I may have written that may have offended you, it was not the real me who wrote that. It was a different me trying to be funny. It's also a totally different me from the me who decides what comedies get financed and green lit. That me knows what's funny and what isn't!

"If you still feel offended after reading this, you are being reactive and oversensitive. That's on you!"

The next time one of your adolescent missives is hacked, simply refer the press, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse to that disclaimer. It speaks for itself.

A final cautionary note: Do not under any circumstances say or write any variation of the sentence, "I don't have a racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or ageist bone in my body." And for J.J. Hunsecker's sake don't even think about saying that some of your best friends are black, gay, old, poor, or female. Everyone knows narcissistic movie moguls with fuck you money don't have friends.

Best Always,

TWTCMG

]]>Book Excerpt: Softball, The Music Biz and the Me Decadetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.63160802014-12-12T12:31:20-05:002015-02-11T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/(This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Field Notes from a Music Biz Life.)

Once in a great while, the exploits of a sports team transcend the playing fields to illuminate something profound about a particular time and place.

Consider the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals, a rainbow band of brothers who, 6½ games out with only 12 to play, clinched the National League Pennant on the last day of the season -- and then defeated the almighty New York Yankees in the World Series. Or gaze upon these Boston Celtics, whose NBA dynasty was sparked by the selfless ballhandling of Bob Cousy and the defensive genius of Bill Russell. Or the U.S unit that redefined the phrase "what goes around, comes around" when they won the 1994 World Boomerang Championship in Tokyo.
The Boss Takes Stock at WeedstockBruce Springsteen takes the field at second base as Weedstock, a triple-header between the E Street Kings and the Record World Flashmakers, gets underway. In the outfield, roadie Natty Dread strikes a casual pose. (Photo: Ira Mayer)

The Record World Flashmakers, our magazine's softball team -- a ragtag troupe of writers, editors, researchers, and other music biz denizens -- never won a world championship. And our struggles against behemoth record companies, well oiled publishers, and superstars (and their entourages) might seem puny next to the heroics of the Cards, the Celts, or the Boomerangs.

But one can argue, especially if one leaves objectivity in the dirt where it belongs, that the story of the Flashmakers reveals more about the Me Decade -- the good, the bad, and the idiotic -- than a dozen discotheques full of platform shoes, pet rocks, and mood rings.

Our story begins with a July, 1971 heartbreaker on a makeshift patch of green in Manhattan's Central Park. It reaches a climax at what I like to call Weedstock: a 1976 triple-header against the E Street Kings (Bruce Springsteen, Miami Steve Van Zandt & Co.) on an overgrown high school diamond in Red Bank, New Jersey (more than 60 miles away!) -- a contest so dramatic it's forever etched in the hearts and minds of many who weren't there.

----------------

The original Flashmakers exist mostly as oral legend, having been passed down from the Me Generation to the i-Generation at thousands of jams, slams, and thank you, ma'ams in musty clubs and all-night bars throughout the five boroughs and beyond. (Several key players now claim that the team never existed; photos like the one below, they say, are easily fabricated with modern technology.)

The Original Flashmakers

We had talent to burn, but we were a motley crew -- no coach, no uniforms, no plays, no hand signals, no scorecards, and no practices. Central Park was our home turf, but we shunned the ballfields reserved for legitimate clubs -- fields with such accouterments as backstops and infield dirt. We wandered around till we found a spot we fancied, scattered rock 'n' roll T-shirts to serve as bases, and said, "Batter up."

Our first game, against music publishers Mills Music, started promisingly, as extra-base hits by shortstop Fred "The Living Legend" Goodman and outfielder Marty "Mad Dog" Snider propelled us to an early lead. Power hitting by Larry "Rockaways" Newman and stalwart defense by the double-play combination of Goodman-to-Sigman-to-Gregg Geller (6-4-3) expanded that lead to seven going into the final inning.

It was then that the good turned bad, and finally idiotic. With victory at hand, RW publisher Bob "Bullet Bob" Austin solemnly gathered us together. Did he express pride in our performance? Caution us against overconfidence? Promise us free drinks after the game? No. His message, in so many words, was this: "I own the magazine; we're way ahead; I'm pitching."

We felt like hurling as Bob's hurling gave up run after run to the Mills men. None of us had the balls, or enough money in the bank, to risk relieving our reliever. Final score: BW-16, RW-15.

Soon thereafter, we accepted a challenge from a ringer-stacked freelance outfit put together by two of my hardest-hitting, hardest-drinking former Frat brothers, Jack "Purv" Atkins and Richie "Ricardo" Robbins. Purv smacked a homer to center-right early on that may still be bouncing around West 59th Street, and the final result was too humiliating to concern ourselves with.

The pre-historic Flashmakers soldiered on, winning a game here and there with the help of a couple of power-hitting Rockaways firemen imported by Newman and the pitching of my high school pal Lenny Beer, who had written some concert reviews and thus established a byline -- and who shed the three piece suit he wore by day at Clairol to show how a killer underhand bullet was meant to be thrown. (There'd be nothing underhanded about the bullets Lenny would be tossing -- or withholding -- when he took over as RW Chart Editor a few months later.)

----------------------

If we can confirm little about the original Flashmakers, we know far too much about the team's second, and final, iteration. For that we have one David McGee, the team's intrepid player/manager/historian, to blame, I mean to thank.

In the summer of '75, Jon Skiba convinced David to revive the team. Jon knew that David -- a Tulsa transplant who'd recently been promoted to assistant editor at RW after a devoted stint in the mail room (so devoted, he inspired Bob Austin to remark, "He loves his work") -- would bring to the task the dedication, creativity, and vision he had honed in the mail room.

Along with David, Jon, and Fred "The Living Legend" Goodman, key players included: Howie "Ol' Ragarm" Levitt (RW); Marc "The Barber" Kirkeby (RW); Gary Kenton (WB); Ed "Easy Ed" "The Goose" Levine (WB), possibly the only player in the history of the game to have two nicknames; Steven "Buck" Baker (Elektra/Asylum and later WB); Albie Hecht (an early music video director, now running Headline News); David Herscher (WB Publishing); John Kostick (Columbia promotion); Stuart Sank (UA), the man whose name could have served as the entire headline if he got canned; Mike Shalett (Elektra), a gifted player who went on to create Soundscan with Mike Fine); writer Stan Mieses; Polydor's power-hitting promo wizard John Boulos; and Robert Smith (Epic and later Geffen).

David was more than a fine ballplayer and a diligent manager. He was (still is, as anyone who clicks here can see) a wonderful writer. It was David's decision to chronicle the Flashmakers' every move -- and many moves they never made -- that gave everlasting resonance to the team's triumphs and tragedies.

David's reportage, in the Softball News section of his weekly Record World column, New York, NY, was always grounded in fact; he told the truth about who won and who lost and by how much. From that point, however, the descriptions tilted toward the fantastical, all in the service of telling a more expansive, multi-dimensional tale -- a Tall Tale, if you will.

McGee recalls, "Right off the bat we found ourselves in a serious rivalry with Atlantic Studios. Studio manager Big Mac McCollum ran the team and had secured a permit for the use of diamond No. 6 on the Heckscher softball fields in Central Park. Atlantic won our first meeting by a close score; a key hit by Mac in a late-inning rally secured the Atlantic win.

"However, in what was likely the first installment of Softball News, I wrote a completely fanciful account of the contest. Although I clearly indicated the final score as being in Atlantic's favor, I described the game as if Record World had really been the victor and added something about Mac fuming over our resilience in coming back repeatedly and surging ahead of Atlantic on the scoreboard.

"Mac was a big guy and I had never met him until we opposed each other on the diamond, but he was an easygoing fellow with a warm sense of humor, so I thought he might get a kick out of my distorted view of reality. He did, but when we met a second time that season, he came over to our bench and said to me, 'Now don't you go writing no bullshit about me in that magazine.' Needless to say, my account of that game had little to do with reality and everything to do with creating a larger than life character out of Mac.

"In ensuing years he would complain to me about the way I portrayed him in the column, but his assistant confided in me that Softball News had made him a star in the studio and he secretly loved the folk hero I had made him out to be. I want to be clear: I never misreported a score--if we got beat, I gave the score and made it clear we had fallen, but I did not hesitate to aggrandize the accomplishments of our players or to portray us as a merciless but gifted band of music business softball mercenaries who played as hard as we partied."

Weedstock

The Summer of '76 triple-header that pitted the Flashmakers vs. the E Street Kings was, in retrospect, every bit as monumental as the Games of the XXI Olympiad unfolding just a few hundred miles to the North.

David picks up the narrative: "It was sunny and 90-plus degrees when we convened on a Saturday on a high school baseball field in, I believe, Red Bank. Not all of our regular nine or ten could make it that day so our lineup was fleshed out with two newcomers. One was our assistant art director Michael "The Schanz" Schanzer in left field. And on the mound, coming out of semi-retirement in our hour of need, our managing editor, Howie Levitt. Also, to bolster our offense, I flew in from Tulsa as Howie's battery mate one Richard 'Mox the Box' Moxley, a friend I had known since seventh grade who had been an All-State lineman as a high school footballer and with whom I had played on basketball teams all through our school years. As I recall we were talking about playing only one game, but when the first game began an incredible drama began to unfold.

The Boss, at Second, Comes up ShortBruce Springsteen, playing second base, diving in vain for a sharply hit ball through the infield. That's Flashmaker (Steven "Buck") Baker running to second base. In the outfield, Bruce roadie Natty Dread moves in to field the ground ball. (Photo: Ira Mayer)

"On the mound for the Kings was Bruce's fireballing agent Barry Bell (he's still Bruce's agent, but I don't think he pitches anymore--softball, that is), who began setting down the Flashmakers with impunity. But when we took the field, Howie, deftly employing his famed and feared 'Semitic Screwball,' matched Bell out for out. We barely made a dent offensively--the only scoring threat on our part came in the 6th when I tripled down the left field line with two outs. But our next batter struck out and Bell set us down 1-2-3 in the seventh to secure a 1-0 win for the Kings.

"I do not recall how the Kings scored their only run but I do remember one play that saved at least two runs and snuffed out a Kings rally in one fell swoop. I remember it because I made it. With two on and two out, Bruce launched a drive high and far into the right center field gap. The runners were circling the bases at the crack of the bat. In center field, I saw the ball good off the bat and took off to the spot where I thought it was going and kept running and running, closing in on the outfield fence and stopping just short of it as I made an over-the-shoulder catch compared in all the sporting journals of the day to Willie Mays's astounding catch of Vic Wertz's drive to the warning track in the 1954 World Series.

"RW's Ira Mayer was there that day in his capacity as team photographer and actually had his camera at the ready as I closed in on the fly ball. He snapped the picture just as the ball landed in my glove and I reached over with my right hand to secure it in the pocket. Also visible in the photo are a shirtless Max Weinberg rounding second base and looking back at me, and Jon Skiba, playing second base, running towards the outfield in preparation for receiving a relay throw that never came.

The Catch(Photo: Ira Mayer)

"After the intensity of game 1, we all decided immediately to make it a doubleheader. Less memorably, we lost game 2 by a score of 6-4.

"But two games were not enough when the sun was still high in the sky and blazing hot and we were all fired up. So a tripleheader it became, with the third game being another nail-biter and another 1-0 Kings win. Once more Barry Bell bested Howie in an amazing display--on both pitchers' parts--of grit and resolve. The two teams played superb defense throughout, with the big play coming midway through the game. The Flashmakers had advanced a runner to second base off Bell. Our regular third baseman, Warner Bros.' David Herscher (always the best dressed player on the field), scorched a Bell pitch for a knee-high line drive that seemed destined for the right-center gap--until Bruce, playing second base, dove headlong to his right and speared it in his glove to squelch the rally. I believe Bruce also drove in the Kings' lone run that game.

"I believe the Kings got not more than three or four hits off Howie in the third game, and they didn't have much more than that in the first game. The 'Semitic Screwball' was a thing of beauty, a work of art to behold from any angle, save that of the batter, apparently. By the way, my then-wife, Nikki, was there with our Super 8 camera and just happened to catch Bruce's diving grab on film--it's kind of the Zapruder film of softball."

---------------------

David is one hell of a guy, but the well-being of the Flashmakers occasionally inspired a flash of ruthlessness that rivaled that of his hardball counterpart, the Yanks' George Steinbrenner.

For one season, when the team was in a fast pitch league in Central Park, David purloined Barry Bell from the E Street Kings. Then he added high school senior Geoffrey Felder, the son of the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus, to the roster, thus assuring that, with Doc attending the games, we had the finest cheering section in the softball cosmos.

Unbeknownst to David, his coverage of the Flashmakers came under frequent assault from our publisher, Bob "Bullet Bob" Austin. Bob would summon me into his office, wave David's latest column in the air and remind me that we were not Sports Illustrated.

Maybe Bob had a point about editorial priorities; maybe was still traumatized by the Mills Music debacle; or maybe he just resented that we were having so much damn fun. In any case, he kept complaining and we kept publishing Softball News.

But I wonder if Bob's resentment speaks to the deeper meaning of the Flashmakers story, as told by David McGee.

To me, the glorification of our players in Softball News was a sly commentary on the nature of hype -- a reminder that we all create narratives in which we are the heroes. More specifically, I think David was subtly sending up the music biz hype machine, of which Record World was -- there's no denying it -- a crucial part. In our straight reporting -- and especially on our charts -- we told the truth about who won and who lost and by what margin. But the ads, the reviews and, yes, the columns we published every week portrayed, more often than not, the heroics, not the flaws, of the amazing, complicated characters who paraded through our hallways and did so much to shape the culture of the 1970s.

It's All Over NowShaking hands all around post-Weedstock. From left: David Herscher; Richard "Mox the Box" Moxley, Bruce Springsteen; David McGee; Howie Levitt; Springsteen road manager Rick Seguso. (Photo by Ira Mayer.)]]>Book Excerpt: Management, and Fun, by Wandering Aroundtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62628622014-12-03T12:47:00-05:002015-02-02T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/(This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Field Notes from a Music Biz Life.)

January, 1973.

PARIS, FRANCE U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho sign a cease-fire agreement that, according to President Richard Nixon, "brings peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia."

WASHINGTON, D.C. Former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. are convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

NEW YORK, NY Record World moves three blocks south.

Despite the upheaval -- the drinking, the fighting, the insane deadlines, the insomnia, the anxiety attacks, the ad cancellations, the threats, the partners' mutually assured destructiveness, the pressure to generate profits from the flimsiest Special Issues -- working at Record World in the early '70s was a blast.

Record sales surged in the U.S. and abroad, but the corporatization that would rob the industry of its vibrancy hadn't yet exerted its stranglehold. We operated at the intersection -- in some ways as the intersection -- of an astonishing mix of musicians (aspiring to superstar), label moguls, promotion and PR reps, publishers, deejays, retailers, rack jobbers, managers, bookers, bookies, druggies, fashionistas, and all manner of street hustlers and hangers-on.

Singer-songwriters competed with prog rockers, glam-shockers, and soul harmonizers for chart dominance, while disco was pulsating to the surface and punk was poised to savage all things bombastic. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was winding down, Watergate was winding up, and cocaine and Quaaludes replaced beer and martinis on many a thrill-seeker's menu -- all of this made life at this particular trade at this particular time super-charged and super-fun.

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Record World had spent its formative years on the second floor of the Fisk Building at 200 W. 57th Street in Manhattan, a tacky, rickety structure (since refurbished) whose ground-level diner, Fisk Fountain, was the greasiest greasy spoon in the nabe. Then-assistant editor Bob Merlis recalls ordering a meat loaf sandwich and having Lem, the counter man, ask, "What kind of white bread do you want that on?" The eatery's phone booth served time as the temporary HQ for the bubblegum empire of Kasenetz-Katz ("Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," "Chewy, Chewy" and other double-entendre ear worms), who, rumor had it, had been locked out of their offices.

The vibe was college newspaper meets music-freak cave.

Most of us were raggedy guys barely out of college. We wore jeans, rock T-shirts (free, a necessity given the woeful salaries), and cheap boots or sneaks. Suits out, hirsute in: long hair, beards, mustaches and zany sideburns. There were few women, a state of affairs that would be remedied over time.

We didn't have separate offices or even cubicles. Desks, couches and chairs were piled ceiling-ward with singles, albums, test-pressings, press releases, publicity photos, promo T-shirts, and other pop paraphernalia -- a small fraction of which, had it been saved, would be worth a fortune on eBay today.

To the right of the small reception area dwelled the chart department, where mountains of mailed-in sales and airplay reports yearned to be opened. At the far end of the office, I shared space with Sid and the associate editor, and our doors were always open. Next door was the glorified closet some called a conference room. Writers and editors squeezed into a ring of small offices around a small quad that served as a kind of demilitarized hang-out zone.

The door to Bob Austin's private corner office was rarely open. But he often left it unlocked and never seemed to notice when his album cache was less bountiful apres lunch than pre.

With Sid and Bob physically gone or neutralized by the gridlock of their hatred, there were few rules. The phrase "human resources" didn't exist, much less was there a department of. There was no employee handbook, no hiring process, no firing process, no grievance process, no goals, no performance reviews, no sick days, no personal days, no mental health days, no computers, no voicemail, no fax machines.

The adults in our midst tended to have old people's names like Morton Hillman, Pearl Balitsky, and Winifred Horton. They did adult things like sell ads, keep books, and schedule production -- things that were necessary but not necessarily fun.

We cringed at Mort's pomposity and laughed when he forsook ad sales to run for a seat in the New York State Assembly. When the erstwhile big band trumpeter won, the joke was on us. Pearl didn't say much except "No," but Winnie had a way with words. One winter's day she got to the office and declared the wind in Brooklyn was so strong that, as she phrased it, "I was blown all the way up Nostrand Avenue." Those brave enough to correct her frequent mispronunciations were met with a sharp, "You say it your way, I'll say it mine."

When musicians showed up without advance warning for an interview and a photo op, we scrambled.

Bob Merlis, a RW assistant editor from the fall of '69 to the fall of '71, when he joined Warner Bros. Records and launched a career as an ace public relations exec, recalls this exchange with a fresh-faced new duo called, simply, Carpenters.

Carpenters, Richard and Karen (Polaroid by Bob Merlis)

"There was no bio, no notice and, at the time, they had only released a single (a cover of the Beatles' 'Ticket To Ride').

Me: So how did you come up with the name...a religious reference? ('Jesus Was A Carpenter' -- and I only knew that because Johnny Cash sang it!)"

That we took pictures of future superstars with a cheap Polaroid was sorta cute. That we didn't have a decent stereo wasn't.

One time, Helen Reddy's high strung husband/manager Jeff Wald arrived with Helen's new single. (This was before She Was Woman.) He plunked the 45 on our creaky turntable for a command performance. The record sounded okay to me, but Jeff went bananas. If only he could have heard the cacophony that filled the office every Wednesday when our singles and album reviewers played disc after disc simultaneously, furiously typing their reviews to make deadline. We had mash ups when mash ups weren't cool.

---------------------

By the end of '72 it was time to move on up from our funky Fisk digs. To their everlasting credit, Sid and Bob signed a long-term lease for a brand new space -- with magnificent view -- on the 42nd floor at 1700 Broadway. The location was perfect: down the street from Carnegie Hall, up the street from the Brill Building, and within striking distance of both the Carnegie and Stage delis.

The enmity of the partners and my inexperience made the move itself an exercise in screwball comedy. I've blocked most of it out, but can't forget one moment late in the game when Bob grokked the gravity of a multi-year lease. The options he had in mind, renegotiate or move back, were equally preposterous.

The fun of working in the new building often began in the elevator, where you might encounter the colorful members of Mandrill on their way to Polydor Records on 38; or be "this close" to James Brown while an assistant combed the great man's great hair en route to James Brown Productions on 40, where he occupied an actual throne; or Phil Spector on his way to a press conference at Allen Klein's lavish suite on 43.

At a pit stop on 42, you might look up, way up, and find yourself peeing beside New York Knick legend Dave Debusschere, VP/GM of The American Basketball Association, whose offices were next door; or you might pause while zipping up because Taj Mahal was toking up and deadpanning, "Smokin' in the boys room."

Before you reached your desk, you might encounter the razor wit of receptionist Walli Nicita, a Hollywood casting director who'd moved to NY with her husband, Rick, a William Morris agent and later a founder of CAA. Walli was a keen deflator of inflated egos with better radar than Radar O'Reilly -- her PA broadcasts conveyed necessary information with a dash of irony. She also contributed on-the-money concert reviews, though, it must now be revealed, a few were ghost-penned by Rick.

The layout at 1700 featured a writers' bullpen that added a college-Frat feel conducive to newbie-hazing. We wandered in and out of each others' spaces all day and got things done via thousands of spontaneous interactions. The word "meeting" wasn't in our vocabulary.

A decade later, the book In Search of Excellence was hailed as a revolutionary business text for declaring that productivity can be enhanced via "Management by wandering around and an apparent lack of rigid command chains." Wonder if author Tom Peters ever lurked around 1700 Broadway disguised as a promo man...

Management by wandering around wasn't the only technique we stumbled into. Our internship-for-college-credit program featured a case of mistaken identity and a bottle of whiskey. Hank Bordowitz says, "I came up to your office and explained the idea of an internship -- 'It's basically like sanctioned slave labor.' You looked at me and said, 'So I don't have to pay you?' I said, 'Nope. This is for experience.'"

And so he had his internship and was a step closer to his Rutgers degree. "One of my duties," Hank adds, "was to copy the charts on Wednesday so we could inform the people with the secret Record World chart phone number of the positions of their records. I was standing in the mailroom running off copies when Sid Parnes came in. At 19 I had a full black beard, dressed like a college student -- not a problem at RW, as so did most of the staff."

Hank, as it happened, bore a passing resemblance to our mailroom guy, Brian, aka the Tasmanian Devil. Hank adds, "Sid looked around and saw me at the copier. He strolled over, handed me a twenty dollar bill. He said, 'the usual,' and walked out. It turned out Sid came into the mailroom every other day or so, gave the mailroom guy a twenty and sent him across the street to the liquor store for a fifth of whiskey."

-------------------

Sooner or later, most every major recording artist made a pilgrimage to Record World. It was part of the hitmaking game, and everyone wanted to have hits. Marc Kirkeby, a former assistant editor and News Editor, says, "I doubt that any American magazine of that era could even approach the quantity and quality of performers who wandered those halls."

Marc, who would know -- he's a world-class music archivist and historian -- adds, "Just recall the stars -- big stars-- of R&B music sitting alone in DeDe's office, waiting for DeDe."

DeDe Dabney, Record World's R&B editor and author of the weekly column Soul Truth, was a pharmacist's daughter and Philadelphia transplant who joined the magazine in 1972 after the demise of her tip sheet Soul Music Survey. She was gorgeous and charismatic, but that was hardly the only reason she was sought after by the R&B industry's top artists, radio programmers, and executives.

DeDe had a feel for the street. She spent hours on the phone every week with top radio programmers like Frankie Crocker (WBLS-FM, NY), E. Rodney Jones (WVON, Chicago), and her Joe "Butterball" Tamburro (WDAS, Philadelphia), finding out what records they were spinning and suggesting tracks they weren't as yet clued into. When your record was one of "DEDE'S DITTIES TO WATCH," it was watched.

Nearly every big-name R&B artist of the day -- including the Tempts, the Tops, Al Green, the O'Jays, the Spinners, the Delfonics, Kool & the Gang, and Michael Jackson -- came by to see her; we basked in the glory she reflected. Top execs from around the country -- Kenny Gamble (Philadelphia Intl.), Buzzy Willis (Polydor), Al Bell (Stax), Miller London (Motown), LeBaron Taylor (Atlantic, CBS), Hosea Wilson (20th Century) and many more -- made regular or semi-regular appearances.

DeDe's spelling and grammar were unconventional to us conventionally-trained editors. So what? The Soul Truth was that her "uniqiquke" prose conjured another world -- a slightly surreal universe in which a line like "Swimmingly the horns and strings" was a complete sentence. Records she picked made you "pat your feet" as opposed to, say, tap them. Few can spell "hors d'oeuvres" without checking, but recalling DeDe's attempt still makes me smile.

When John Lennon, the artist I most wanted to meet, arrived unannounced one Friday with his significant other, May Pang, I was holed up at our printing plant in Hoboken, NJ.

Assistant editor David McGee was at the office that day. He recalls, "I had my back turned to the door and was hunched over the cover of the Jackson Browne album, listening to the haunting 'Song for Adam,' a requiem for Browne's departed friend Adam Saylor, who apparently committed suicide in Bombay.

"When I turned around I was face to face with John Lennon, who was standing alone in the doorway, listening to 'Song for Adam,' apparently as intently as I was. John said, 'That's a great song.'And then, like that, I was in a spirited conversation with John about Jackson Browne, finally getting around to Late for the Sky, of which he had heard only the title track. 'That one got under my skin,' he said, and then John Lennon -- John Lennon, mind you -- added: 'I wish I could write songs like that.'"

"There was something about John's presence that was utterly different from any other artist's -- or even any other human being's -- that I've ever met. He simply seemed to be operating intellectually and spiritually on another plane, and yet at the same time was as regular a guy as you could imagine -- through Jackson Browne's song, he had no trouble connecting with a kid who was then only two years off the plains of Oklahoma and only a few months removed from running the mail room at Record World."

May knew how much John meant to me, and asked him to call me at the printer's. The sound of his voice filled me with joy. We only talked for a couple minutes, but that was all I needed. What stunned me was that this man whose music and worldview had so changed my life didn't want to talk about himself; he was interested in what I was doing in Hoboken!

Most of our guests were human. But assistant editor Bob Nash recalls a visit from a piece of blue fur with a black space for a mouth and ping-pong ball black-spotted cross-eyes.

Jim Henson had paid a visit with Cookie Monster. "Every time I tried to ask Jim Henson a question," Nash says, "Cookie Monster made faces at me. When Henson answered, Cookie gave him silent looks of profound interest, or disbelief or astonishment. Hard as I tried to connect with Henson, I could not take my eyes off of Cookie."

Occasionally, a rock star made off with more than free ink. There was nothing cool about it when Fee Waybill of the Tubes purloined associate editor Howard Levitt's treasured Roy Rogers autographed photo from the wall behind his desk. A call to A&M's PR department threatening to expose Fee's felony prompted the wayward Waybill to make good with the goods.

-----------------

Bob Austin's sometimes tenuous relationship with the laws of physics added to the fun. He often produced ads for last-minute insertion, and we moved heaven and earth to accommodate. One Monday morning, long after the magazine had been printed and distributed, Bob came in with an ad and asked me to squeeze it in. My attempt at rationality didn't stand a chance -- Bob insisted there must be some "printer's trick" that could save the day. (Note to skeptics: I have witnesses!) In whatever cosmic space he now occupies, he's probably still trying to get that ad in.

Art director David Skinner recalls the time Bob presaged the "Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good" scene from Zoolander: "I was putting together a photo montage from one of Bob's pet events that would cover a full page in the magazine. Bob was very concerned about one particular celebrity's picture not appearing next to another celebrity's picture, because, apparently, they hated each other and appearing side-by-side in a Record World montage would bring them together in print eternity. After changing the order of the pictures several times, he was finally satisfied. Then before leaving the room, he scanned his tiny masterpiece and asked, seriously: 'Now...is it going to be this big in the magazine?'"

Humoring Bob was the first, best line of defense; ignoring him was second. Occasionally, he inspired a more direct reaction. Once he badgered Howie Levitt so mercilessly that Howie turned away, looked out the window and asked the world, with a nod to Howard Beale, "Why am I having this conversation with this moron?" Bob walked out calmly, as though nothing unusual had happened.

So ended another surreal scene from the Record World theater of the absurd.

Fred was born in Wilmington, DE in 1946. After graduating with a BA in English from the University of Delaware in '68, he moved to Manhattan, where his first published song, "Fill My Soul," was produced by Koppelman-Rubin (of Lovin' Spoonful/Turtles fame) and recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells. The record came "this close" to being the follow-up to the group's No. 1 smash, "Mony Mony" and served as Fred's introduction to show-biz heartbreak.

"This close" doesn't pay the rent, so Goodman took a job at the trade magazine Record World, where he held a variety of writing and editing positions for three years. Full disclosure: At Record World, Fred was my boss, then we were colleagues, and then I was his boss. We've been friends ever since. During that time, his song "Didn't It Look So Easy" was a moderate R&B hit for the Five Stairsteps, the follow-up to their chestnut, "O-o-h Child." And the instrumental "Esperanto," by the Grand Piano Company, made the MOR charts and became a dance club staple in Northern England.

After leaving Record World to devote more time to songwriting, Fred signed with Steve Popovich's Cleveland Entertainment, where he scored with Ellen Foley's, "We Belong to the Night," an international hit that went No. 1 in the Benelux countries. More than 30 years later, Dutch star Maaike performed it on her country's edition of "X Factor," and the recorded version went to No. 3 in Holland. Fred's songs have been covered by such other artists as the Iron City Houserockers, Gary Private, Sherri London, and Suzi Dietz.

Fred continued to ply his editorial trade at the music trades, contributing to Hits (whose editor/co-owner Lenny Beer is another erstwhile Record World colleague) and putting in several years as the editor at Cash Box, where he toiled for its monumentally cranky owner George Albert, the man who insisted that he "started" everyone and everything in the music industry. Fred recalls, "One day, I asked George if he planned to attend the Palm Springs Film Festival, since he had a home there. He asked me what it was, and when I told him that it was sort of a stateside version of the Cannes Film Festival, he exclaimed, 'Cannes! I started that!'"

In recent years, in addition to serving as managing editor of yet another trade, Pro Sound News, Fred has written, produced and recorded two full-scale albums on his own label, Froy Records. "Kvetch 22," released in 2006 under the name Freddy & The Froy Boys, was a collection of comic pop tunes with zany lyrics, a sort of "Weird Al...lan Sherman." Three years later, Fred released "The Last Days of Rock 'n' Roll" by Fred and the Fredettes, a name he revived from his oldies sing along group that performed regularly at Home Restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side during the 1970s. (Regular Fredettes included the beautiful May Pang.)

Fred continues to write and record new material, and may partner up again with Ellen Foley. He's toying with the title for the next Froy Boys LP -- "Kvetch 23"? "Kvetcher in the Rye"? "Kvetcher in the Wry"?

Fred's parallel career as a gifted parodist includes these gems:
"Nude Guys" ("Blue Skies")
I went to a film last Saturday night
I knew right away something wasn't quite right
An all-male cast was up on the screen
And it wasn't "Platoon," if you know what I mean
There were nude guys smiling at me
Nothing but nude guys did I see
No girls, nary a one
Nothing but nude guys having fun

"Then He Brissed Me" ("Then He Kissed Me")
When I was 8 days old, my parents threw a party for me
They invited their friends and all of the family
The food was good, the drinks were nice
I was having the best time of my life
But suddenly the rabbi took a knife
And then he brissed me

They say great songwriters write about what they know best. Of course, that didn't stop Irving Berlin, a Jew, from conjuring the most famous Christmas carol this side of "Adeste Fidelis." In that spirit, Fred, based on a discovery he made about a certain white-bearded Christmas icon, offers this number to add spice to holiday playlists...

]]>Torn Between Two Bosses, Not Feeling Like a Fooltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.61860602014-11-19T14:41:45-05:002015-01-19T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/(This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Field Notes from a Music Biz Life.)

Question: What to do when you have two bosses who hate each other so much they automatically disagree about everything and speak to each other only through you?

Answer: You learn to play them like violins -- or, in the case of Record World co-owners Sid Parnes and Bob Austin, like a klezmer and a kazoo.

It's fashionable nowadays to say you're "not judgmental," to "let go" of your anger, to forgive even the most heinous offenses. Mortal enemies claim, "I don't hate anyone." But when I say that Sid and Bob hated each other, I mean they hated each other. They refused to occupy the same room, even if it was the rest room shared by everyone on our floor; our receptionist was under strict instructions to inform one whenever the other was making his way to the facilities. They rarely mentioned each other's name -- to me at least -- and when they did, their faces turned a similar shade of red. Each made it clear to me -- in words and body language -- that he felt the other was a rotten person who, left to his devices, would ruin the magazine.

I don't know why their feelings ran so deep. By all accounts the two men were friendly enough when they bought the jukebox magazine Music Vendor and launched Record Worldin 1964 -- with the gregarious Bob as the quintessential Mr. Outside and the more reticent Sid as the business-like Mr. Inside.

Bob (left) and Sid (right) in happier times

I do know that by the time I arrived they had zero respect for one another -- Sid saw Bob as a buffoon and Bob saw Sid as a hopeless drunk. Perhaps it was the plain fact that they were equal partners -- that each could, and did, reflexively reject whatever the other proposed -- that alchemized run-of-the-mill resentment into white-hot rage.

Whatever the reason, there was no common ground, no "let's all sit down and work this out." To survive, and perhaps for the magazine to survive, I had to learn when to listen to them, when to ignore them and how to play them.
Sid

Sidmore Parnes was a smart, cosmopolitan New Yorker in his early fifties who had edited Cash Box and then made a lot of money as a music publisher ("Never on Sunday" et al) before co-founding RW. He lived extravagantly in a richly-appointed penthouse apartment with a spectacular terrace at 419 W. 57th Street that he purchased from producer/songwriter/publisher Al Nevins. There, he and his significant other Dr. David Schneider, a therapist, entertained the likes of actress Jane Powell, actor Robert Clary, singers Kaye Ballard and Sylvia Syms and TV producer James Komack.

When he was sober, Sid could be the menschiest guy in the room. We never talked about each other's personal lives -- he never hid the fact that he was gay, for instance, but in ten years of working together in the same office, we never discussed it -- but something about the way I handled myself gave him confidence I could put out a magazine he'd be proud of.

I had to accept Sid's premise that as a trade publication we were more music biz cheerleaders than muckrakers. He'd say, "We're not Rolling Stone or The Village Voice. If something bad happens, we'll cover it; but we don't go looking for it." That was okay with me. I read every word of Rolling Stone" and The Village Voice, but I didn't want to be them.

My utterly pragmatic perspective might have been genealogical. My dad, Carl Sigman, had seen writing songs as a job, a craft, not an art. That's how I looked at my gig. I didn't aspire to publish literature -- though David McGee, Robert Palmer, Vince Aletti and other RW writers were as talented as just about anyone you could find in the pages of Stone, Creem or Crawdaddy. Besides, I loved all kinds of music -- from MOR to show tunes to, well, klezmers and kazoos -- not just the hipper-than-thou stuff championed by some know-it-all rock critics.

The counterpoint to our flexibility in editorial coverage was the toughness of our charts, where we were anything but cheerleaders. Sid was initially nervous about Lenny's chart revolution, which alienated at least one or two major advertisers every week. But once we'd taken the leap of faith, he understood that standing by our chart numbers, even when it cost us short-term ad dollars, wasn't just the right thing to do. It cemented our credibility, and that would be good, very good for long-term business.

Getting Sid's financial support -- convincing him to invest in Record World's growth -- was far harder than securing his intellectual and moral support. We were hardly flush with cash in the early '70s, and most of what we did take in was injected intravenously into Sid's increasingly lavish lifestyle, which included upkeep on a fancy country getaway in tony Wilton, Connecticut with a large pool and magnificent grounds. Even when we started making real money, Sid, it seemed, would rather put another expensive painting on his wall than hire another writer.

Bob

Bob, a decade or so older than Sid, lived on Sutton Place with his wife, Min. He had a grown son, about whom he never spoke, and a grown daughter, Karen, an aspiring singer who worked for a while at Polydor Records. I knew next to nothing about Bob's home life, but if Sid spent money he didn't have, it was said that Bob still had the first dollar he ever earned.

He was rarely around, preferring to promote the magazine by visiting our offices in Europe and hobnobbing with industry honchos at confabs in Cannes (MIDEM), Tokyo (Tokyo Music Festival) and other far-flung locales. When Bob was in town, he had little interaction with the editorial staff, preferring to hole up in his spacious office dictating to his secretary and talking on the phone.

After returning from a two or three week trip, though, Bob often felt the need to share his editorial wisdom, which ranged from the anachronistic to the surreal.

When Bob's assignments were factually challenged, they were easy enough to handle. When he assigned me, with Ted Baxter-ish gravitas in his voice, to "get the story on the Strawberries" -- a conflation of the actual bands the Strawbs and the Raspberries -- I pointed out that no such band existed. Bob retreated; in a Baxter-ish huff, yes, but he retreated.

When the matter at hand was more subjective, going rogue was sometimes called for. One time Bob summoned me to his office and asked me to bring a list of future cover subjects. He took a quick look at that list, shook his head disapprovingly and strode off to lunch, mumbling about "changing the way we do things around here."

I feared Bob would return from lunch in his all-too-familiar Mr. Prosecutor mood, where it wouldn't matter what I said because by definition he was right and I was wrong. Here, the way to avoid a one-sided trial was to dispose of the evidence. While Bob was at lunch, I sneaked into his office and purloined the list. Bob never mentioned it again.

Once in a while, avuncular Bob would call me in to his office and wax nostalgic about the '40s. He'd recall fond chats with my mom at Louis Prima's office when he was selling ads for Billboard and she was Louis' Gal Friday. He'd reminisce about drinks with Carl and other bizzers at Lindy's back when, as Bob put it with a whiff of condescension, "Dad was a top songwriter." More than once he reminded me, "I did Dad a favor by hiring you."

What came through in these encounters was Bob's ability to manufacture warmth, the kind of warmth that made him a beloved figure to many in the industry -- the kind of warmth the powers-that-were at the Performing Arts Division of the Anti-Defamation League recognized when they honored him with their 1974 Human Relations Award.

(Or maybe they just thought he'd bring in the heftiest donations.)

I never said much during those sessions with Bob, but they were rare opportunities for friendly interactions with a man who rarely said good morning and never had a positive word for my job performance.

There was, of course, a twist to Bob's sepia-toned remembrances: On the planet Earth, my parents barely knew Bob. And he didn't get me the job; I met him only after I started at Record World, after Jubilee Records president Jerry Blaine, a real friend of my dad's, suggested I contact Sid.
Sid

I loved Sid despite his flaws. In my experience, he was a fundamentally honest person -- even about his drinking -- and our dealings were generally straightforward. But I can't deny that I sometimes took advantage of his tendency to say "white" when Bob said "black."

My first confrontation with Sid was about my compensation. My mishandling of that interaction gave birth to the "If Bob is against it, you should be for it" gambit.

When I was promoted in the fall of '72, my 12K per year salary was, even in early '70s dollars, pathetically low for the editor of a major trade publication. Not only was this unfair to me, but it effectively put a cap on everyone else's wages -- I couldn't very well pay my number-two editor more than I was earning.

The exception to this sharecropper system was West Coast ad director Spence Berland, who was making more than five times as much as I.

Spence Berland, John Lennon

I was so incensed when I discovered this, I confronted Sid on the spot. I stood over his desk -- I was standing and he was sitting -- and, letting my anger and self-righteousness do the talking, proceeded to write the metaphorical book on how not to negotiate.

I said the disparity between Spence's pay and mine was outrageous -- I was working around the clock and making less than secretaries at record companies. I said Spence was a phenomenal salesman but without me and my team he wouldn't have anything to sell. I said we'd lose good people -- and we couldn't hope to compete with Billboard-- unless we paid writers, editors and designers a decent wage.

By claiming the moral high ground, I put Sid on the defensive. By comparing my pay to someone else's I took the focus off my intrinsic value. By implying that I was one of the "good people" we'd lose, I invited Sid to call my bluff. And it was a 100 percent bluff -- I believed I had the best job in the world and I wasn't going anywhere.

Sid rejected the comparison with Spence, who, he argued, worked on pure commission and was therefore contributing directly to the bottom line. He said I was only 23 and was just starting my career. He said, "Mike, I don't respond well to threats" -- a line I've used a million times since then. He said he'd pay me more when the magazine made more, period.

I was losing the argument and it was my own fault. I sensed that Sid needed to feel it was in his interest as well as mine to compensate me fairly. But how could I make that happen? Everything felt scrambled. That's when a mischievous teen spirit somehow took over my body and I stumbled into the "Bob's against it so you must be for it" routine.

I laid it on thick, telling Sid that Bob was so relentlessly down on of me, he'd never agree to pay me more. I said I couldn't believe Sid would go along with that.

I could feel the emotional balance shift. Sid got quiet. He still seemed angry, but now it wasn't directed at me. I hoped he was seething inwardly at Bob's lack of generosity, which Sid well knew could border on cruelty. He said he'd think about the money.

The next day Sid came back with a $100 a week raise. 17K per year was hardly a princely sum, but it was a significant percentage increase and an important act of good faith.

There was, of course, a twist -- one proviso to the bump in salary: Bob, who signed all paychecks, must never know. To keep him in the dark, Sid had an inelegant solution: Bob would sign two checks, each representing half my salary. It seemed unlikely that Bob would fall for this, but he did, mindlessly signing two checks in my name every pay period for nearly a decade. My real compensation would be filed in the same evidence locker as that list of cover subjects...

Next time: How Sid faced down one of the industry's most revered and powerful players at a critical moment.

Me (right) with another 23 year-old guy, a good Catholic boy from New Jersey. I had the best job in the world.]]>The Who's 10th Anniversary, 40 Years Latertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.61468682014-11-12T15:07:46-05:002015-01-12T05:59:01-05:00Michael Sigmanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Field Notes from a Music Biz Life.

In early 1973, shortly after I took over as editor of Record World, a mysterious package from our Latin American Headquarters in Miami -- aka the apartment of our sole employee in that city -- appeared on my desk. I opened it to find a jumble of single-spaced typewritten pages, a small stack of checks, photos of Nelson Ned, Tito Puente, and other Latin luminaries, a wad of cash, a Fania Records logo, and a slew of crude ad layouts. The copy, which bore the introduction, "First in Spanish and then in English," was spiced with sentence fragments, glaring typos and randomly placed exclamation points (something about "a concert! At Madison! Square Garden").

A jolt of angst stabbed me in the gut and spiraled brainward; there was no way to make this publishable. I relaxed a little when Sid, our co-owner, arrived just before noon in good form -- in other words, not drunk. Maybe he'd agree to send the mess back to Miami for a do-over. Sid's sober response made me wish I were drunk: He rummaged through the checks, stuffed the cash in his pocket, and said, "It's a special. Run it."

At that time Record World was only marginally profitable, and Sid never looked a gift horse in the mouth, regardless of what tongue that mouth spoke.

Unlike our deep-pocketed competitor Billboard, with its healthy mix of worldwide subscribers and strong newsstand sales, the overwhelming majority of Record World's revenue came from advertising by just a handful of major labels -- CBS, WEA (Warner/Elektra/Atlantic), MCA, RCA, and Capitol -- and a dozen or so indies, including A&M, Roulette, Brunswick, Buddha, and Bell.

And there was more than money at stake.

Ads made us look good. A thick book (that's what we call magazines in the business - a book) larded with lush four-color spreads featuring album covers that were often themselves works of art broadcast success. Which bred more success. More important, we purported to tell the story of what was happening in the trade, and trade ads were unfiltered signifiers of who was hyping what and how aggressively.

With Lenny's revolution in the charts making some labels see red, we had to broaden our ad base to stay out of the red. We doubled down on that time-honored trade magazine cash cow, the special issue.

Except for a higher print bill, a little extra in mailing, and increased sales commissions, it cost roughly the same to produce a 128-page special as a 64-page regular issue, with two or three times the revenue. The pressure from Sid to do more and more of them was intense.

Our most reliable special, the summer "Annual," was an ode to tedium. It was nearly as thick as Vogue's Fall Fashion issue, but there were no stunning supermodels or fabulous clothes -- just the names and addresses of thousands of rack jobbers, one-stops, distributors and other participants in an industry infrastructure that few, including most of our own writers, understood or cared about.

What saved our Annuals from drowning in minutiae were the covers, such as this Norman-Rockwell-with-a-twist gem from art director David Skinner:

With no clear plan, we stumbled from special to special, choosing subjects around which we could pitch ads -- Packaging! Women in Music! The Midnight Special TV show! The content tended towards puffery and the ads turned out to be tough sells. You might think it was groovy that lots of women were having hits, but why would you need to advertise about it?

The turning point, both editorially and financially, was our 10th Anniversary tribute to The Who in November, 1974.

That we were chosen over Billboard to tell the story of my favorite band seemed too good to be true. What it took to tell that story nearly broke me.

My obsession with The Who began in 1964-65 when I was 15 and their singles "I Can't Explain" and "My Generation" explained why it was impossible to explain my generation to myself, let alone my parents.

The perfectly interlocking musical personalities of the four members -- the funny-looking/rebellious/guitar-smashing/ leader/songwriter Pete Townshend, the great-looking/passionate/ golden boy vocalist Roger Daltrey, the brilliant, enigmatic bassist John Entwistle and the gloriously chaotic drummer Keith Moon -- were the very illustration of a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

The Who's subsequent string of '60s hits -- "Happy Jack," "The Kids Are Alright," "I Can See for Miles," "Pictures of Lily" -- were as essential to my teenagery as basketball, my guy friends and my lack of girlfriends. Their 1967 concept album The Who Sell Out, was a hilarious, prescient satire on consumer culture.

By the time I graduated from college and started at Record World in the summer of '71, the sixties were gone and Carole King's Tapestry had become the founding document of the era of the softer singer-songwriter. Who's Next, released that August, was a defiant declaration that The Who hadn't sold out and that biting, meaningful rock 'n' roll was alive and kicking out the jams.

Who's Next was a great record, but The Who were at their core a live band, and their performance at Forest Hills Stadium that summer was the most thrilling show I'd ever seen.

A burst of rain threatened to cancel the concert, but the skies cleared and the group blasted through one masterpiece after another, building to a driving "Magic Bus" that would have blown the roof off the place if the place weren't outdoors. Townshend put an anti-ribbon on the proceedings by smashing not just one, but two guitars, after which he decimated those instruments with a third piece of equipment.

Needless to say, no encore was necessary -- or, given the destruction on display, even possible.

Record World's West Coast Ad VP Spence Berland, a transplanted New Yorker and a natural salesman who could get you to buy an ad even if you didn't want one and had no money, convinced The Who's brain trust to give us exclusive rights to publish a special commemorating the group's 10th anniversary.

Quite a coup, considering Billboard's international reach. Spence also enlisted MCA Records, The Who's label, to help us score "Congrats" ads from the label's distributors and the band's friends and associates. The resulting bonanza meant lots of room for editorial coverage, a good thing because there was a big story to tell. It also guaranteed a boatload of extra work for me and our small staff.

Putting out the weekly magazine -- and dealing with industry politics -- was stressful enough; I'd become prone to anxiety attacks, bouts of insomnia, and nasty lower back pain.

Knowing that my workload would spike for the next couple months added a simmering anger to the mix. I was mad at the gods for making me work so hard, mad at Sid for not paying me and the writers better, and mad at Spence who, working on commission, earned more than the top three editors combined. I was even mad at our writers for expecting me to be nice to them while I was doubling their workload without bumping up their salaries.

Anxiety and anger notwithstanding, we threw ourselves into producing an issue worthy of The Who. I was too consumed with planning and editing to interview my heroes, but between our New York, LA and London editors -- and Who experts including John Swenson, Marty Cerf, Greg Shaw, and Binky Phillips -- we told a compelling story.

The trick in avoiding hagiography in a special was finding the quirk. Here, that was easy -- Keith Moon was the quirk that kept on quirking. We wrote about the time he got arrested for a gold bullion robbery because, well, because he was Keith Moon. (He didn't do it.) One advertiser was clearly thinking of Keith with this copy: "...without whom Holiday Inns and Remy Martin may never have survived...doesn't time pass quickly when you're having fun."

This year it's The Who's 50th anniversary. One wonders what Pete Townshend, who famously wrote in "My Generation," "Hope I die before I get old," would say about this quote from his RW interview: "The great thing about rock is that it makes you feel young." Or what Roger Daltrey would think of this remark: "There's no chance of us ever breaking up."

The Who will embark on an epic "Who Hits 50" tour next spring. Maybe they'll make one more record and call it, Who's Counting?

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Our book -- the regular issue and the 92-page pull-out special section -- had to be press-ready by Friday afternoon so it would land on subscribers' desks by Monday morning. The 72 hours before that deadline were pure hell.

Along with RW associate editor Howie Levitt -- a terrific person and a fine editor with whom I shared a Long Island upbringing, a love of rock and sports and a post-hippie sensibility -- I spent nearly every one of those hours at Dispatch Press, our printer, whose desolate location in Hoboken, New Jersey -- when Hoboken wasn't cool -- came to reflect my mood.

Our writers had knocked themselves out to get their stories in on time, but Sid insisted we keep the ad window open till the last minute, which was good for the bottom line but torture for Howie and me.

With more ads pouring in -- which taxed our art department to its limits -- I had to keep increasing the page count, and we ended up laying out -- and re-laying out -- hundreds of pages using the primitive implements available to us at the time: cutting out reams of paper galleys with scissors, then Scotch Taping them to cardboardish "dummy" sheets. Then tearing them up and doing it again.

The irresistible force of Sid was matched by the immovable object of Ray Stein, who ran Dispatch and, as Wednesday turned to Thursday, began to freak out. Ray was a solid guy, and when he warned that if I didn't start feeding him finalized pages he simply wouldn't get the magazine out on time, I believed him.

Sid argued that Ray was crying wolf but Sid had never been to Dispatch and didn't know what he was talking about. Shaking with rage, I told him that our production crew and proofreaders were on their way and I didn't have pages to give them. I told him it was panic time.

Sid relented and we broke our backs and made deadline. Another hour and someone would have had to arrest me for verbal abuse. Another two hours and murder might have been a more appropriate charge.

The special hit the streets on schedule and turned out fine. No, it turned out wonderfully. My state of mind -- and, not coincidentally, the tone around the office -- had swung from dread to relief. More to the point, we were proud of what we'd accomplished.

Before leaving for the day, Howie gently pointed out that he and other staffers felt I had been uncharacteristically short with them while we were on deadline. I knew that was an understatement and felt awful about it, but instead of apologizing, I played the victim. The pressure had been on me, I said, and everyone should get off my case.

I recalled that that my anger had found another undeserving target when, late the previous week, a publicist called to say she was coming over to deliver a press release. I screamed, "Who Cares?" and fantasized about naming the special Who Cares?

The Who issue wasn't just a turning point for Record World. It was a turning point for me. I began to be more assertive in "managing up" -- insisting, for instance, that Sid agree to more reasonable ad deadlines for future specials. I was more mindful about not taking my frustrations out on others, especially the amazing people who worked for me. And I vowed to be more open to criticism, a vow I would forget from time to time in the heady, stress-filled years to come.